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I think that Linus is speaking out of his ass this time. Probably looks so arrogant because Theo and him don't like each other and the OSS universe is too small
by samuel 18y ago
I think that Linus is speaking out of his ass this time. Probably looks so arrogant because Theo and him don't like each other and the OSS universe is too small to their egos.
OpenBSD mindset is to achieve security through excellence. Everyone can look at their code and perceive its quality: everything follows the same coding guidelines, it's well commented and easy to understand, every important commit in the CVS has to be reviewed by at least another commiter, errors are handled early... after looking at it, Linux looks a mess.
That obsession about security leads to a software product that shows robustness and quality. Yes, Linux outperforms OpenBSD in many areas, it has been ported to more architectures and has more functionalities. But, still, Linux could learn a lot about OpenBSD as a project.
- tptacek 18y agoI too have perceived the excellence of OpenBSD. For instance, at Arbor Networks, I had the distinct pleasure of using OpenBSD to manage traffic flows from ISP backbones. When processes malloc'd over 64 megs of data, UVM deadlocked. After writing a passive kernel debugger using KVM to produce repro steps and diag dumps for their team, I was informed that Theo didn't really understand how Cranor's UVM worked, that it was crappy code from Cranor's thesis and all Cranor's fault, and that there was no way I would find anyone who could fix it. There is indeed a lot Linux can learn from OpenBSD, but imitation is probably not the right way to go about it. OpenBSD's track record on security is not unblemished.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- there 18y agoi'm confused what your rant about theo is supposed to mean. you found a problem but didn't know how to fix it, so you presented it to theo and he said he didn't know how to fix it either? he didn't write the code in question and no one on the team (at the time) knew it well enough to change it. what's your point? no one's security record is unblemished and i don't think anyone from the openbsd project would say it is.
- tptacek 18y agoThe code in question was the virtual memory system. That's what UVM is.
- samuel 18y agoNobody at OpenBSD investigated the issue? Well, that's shocking. Their developers behave as assholes sometimes, but they don't ignore sensible bug reports. I had problems with OpenBSD's UVM too, but it was a known issue and increasing NKMEMPAGES_MAX solved it.
- tptacek 18y agoHave they matured since then? Maybe so! I was just giving a snarky answer to the assertion that OpenBSD's code was a gleaming gem of righteousness.